


Everything Under the Moon

by standinginanicedress



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, Magic!Stiles, Sterek ReverseBang, Stiles' bday!, couple monsters of the week, pining and a lot of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 05:13:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11268648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standinginanicedress/pseuds/standinginanicedress
Summary: “Just go in and buy him something and attach a note that says, like, I don’t know,” she flips a curl over her shoulder, “let’s bone.”Derek looks up at the sky and purses his lips. Doesn’t dignify that with a response. There’s no way in hell Derek is going to attach some dinky little note to Stiles’ gift that is either as crass as Erica’s suggestion or as humiliating as something he could come up with himself – no fucking way in hell.But she does have a point. Stiles’ birthday is coming and Derek is shit out of luck and shit out of ideas for ways to make Stiles see him as anything more than justDerek. The way Stiles looks at him sometimes, it’s like he has no fucking idea.





	Everything Under the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> for the 2017 reversebang, inspired by [this amazing art](http://remus-sirius.tumblr.com/post/162105619005) by remus-sirius!!! Of course I picked it because of the magic Stiles element. Y'all already know

“You know,” Erica leans over the picnic table with that god-awful smile she uses when she’s about to be particularly conniving, “it’s his birthday in a week.”

“Whose?” Derek feigns ignorance as well as a seasoned actor. He sips at his coffee, quickly going cold in the late spring wind just the way he likes it, and doesn’t look across the table directly at her. 

She puts her chin in her palm and looks thrilled. Completely and totally fucking ecstatic. Without saying a word, she pushes her chin out forward, behind Derek’s head, and Derek adjusts his sunglasses on his face and frowns. Even while knowing what he’s going to turn around and see, he moves, and looks, and there he is. 

“Not this again,” he mutters, quickly looking away and ducking his head to hide the tell tale signs of a blush on his face. 

“Not what again?” She teases, and her eyebrows are so far up into her hairline it’s a wonder Derek can see them at all. “What?” 

“What?” 

“If I can speak candidly and out of fear of being punched in the nose,” she picks at some lint on her sundress, runs a hand through her bushy hair, “you act like you’re so sure he’d sooner vomit all over you than say yes to a date.”

That’s not really at the forefront of Derek’s worries – it’s never been. And Derek has been worried about Stiles for a long time, a very long time, for far longer than was strictly appropriate for him to be worried. In that way, at least. He’s gone through a lot of different scenarios in his head, over and over again like he’s a sixteen year old kid in Algebra class again, staring out the window and day dreaming of asking someone to the homecoming dance or some shit. It’s humiliating. It genuinely is. 

Derek has thought about Stiles clearing his throat and getting uncomfortable and not meeting Derek’s eyes. Or, Stiles laughing nervously and scratching at the back of his head and saying, man I just don’t think of you like that, or Stiles laughing in his face, or Stiles asking Scott to beat Derek up for him, or Stiles putting one of those curses on his bedroom window so Derek can’t climb inside of it anymore. The vomiting thing will apparently be a new fear, since Erica has introduced it to Derek’s imagination. 

“There just comes a point where pining becomes…” she struggles to find the word for a second, as though she’s honest to god trying to come up with something even vaguely tactful to say. She comes up with, “…pathetic.” 

“We passed pathetic a long time ago,” he mutters darkly, and has to look over his shoulder again. His eyes, sometimes, feel magnetized to where Stiles is. 

He’s crouched over a hole in the ground he’s been studiously digging with a tiny shovel he got from a Baby’s First Gardening kit in his father’s shed. It’s plastic and green and isn’t doing the job as well as an actual, you know, shovel would do. But Stiles had laughed and waved it around and insisted he and his father weren’t yard-work people and his mother killed most plants just by looking at them, said it was the best he had. 

He digs with his shovel, thumps the dirt into the pile he’s building next to him, and wipes his forearm across his brow. Derek takes a sip of his coffee and watches. And, yeah, Scott is watching too – but Scott is watching because he’s interested in the proceedings, hands on his hips while he appraises the hole and the object they intend to bury inside of it.

Derek, however, is very studiously observing the way every time Stiles leans over to dig deeper, his shirt rides up and he can make out the faintest hint of a lower back dimple. Pathetic doesn’t even begin to cover it. 

“I’m just saying. His birthday is in a week,” she taps her fingernails on the wood of the picnic table by the woods outside of Stiles’ childhood house, shrugs her shoulders. “He likes gifts.”

“I can’t believe you’d even say that to me,” he rounds on her, and her hands go up in surrender, but he keeps going. “Gifts? You know I can’t buy gifts. You know that.” 

She should know. She makes a face like she does know. For her seventeenth birthday, the one she had right after Derek had turned her, Derek gave her a swiss army knife. He gave a seventeen year old girl a swiss army knife for her fucking birthday. For her eighteenth, she got a gift card to Starbucks. True, she used it and even eventually got a gold card and takes it all very seriously, but that’s…like, an extended cousin gift. The _I barely know you_ gift. 

He’s just not good at it, and really, that’s fine. His friends know him, and Stiles knows him, and knows he can’t buy gifts. More likely than not, Stiles is not expecting a gift from Derek. He’s expecting to see him at the surprise party they’re going to throw him and he’s expecting Derek to be genial and eat cake and wish him a happy birthday and light the candles on his cake for him, but not a present. 

Scott and Erica and Lydia and Allison and his father will get him presents. Derek doesn’t really need to get him one. 

“You just don’t think about it hard enough. Stiles is so easy to buy for,” she leans back and sips her own drink, casual as all get out. Behind them, Stiles makes a noise of shock, mutters something about a sewer line, laughs nervously. Derek rubs his forehead. “Just walk into the magic shop and pick up the first thing you find. I got him a petrified rat from The Black Plague era. It was ten dollars and disgusting. He acted like I gave him a million dollars.” 

Derek remembers the Bubonic Rat. It came in an air tight glass case with an ominous inscription in Latin about all the things that could possibly go wrong if anyone dared to open it. Stiles displayed it proudly on his shelf of weird shit for about two months, until it came in handy. 

“Biological warfare,” he had said, raising his eyebrows and gingerly taking the rat and its box off the shelf in his bedroom, “is frowned upon in most civilized societies.” 

“Then what’s the point of using that thing?” Derek demanded, while Stiles unbelievably cradled it against his chest like he was fond of it. 

“The Bubonic Plague wasn’t a natural disaster,” is all he had said with a wink, and then sauntered off like the big fat mystery he loves to be so much. He’ll say shit like that – allude to the idea that things like hurricanes and wind and tsunamis aren’t nature, aren’t natural, but created by magic gone wrong. Derek found it, and still to this day finds it, hard to believe that the fucking Black Plague was created by a witch who put the wrong kind of snake venom in a pot, but he digresses. 

Either way, Stiles melted the rat in a pot of boiling fox’s blood and insisted he had killed _the spores_. Derek kept a safe six hundred feet from the jar of black goop the rat had made with the blood, but in the end, Stiles had been right. He threw the jar of it, dripping and disgusting, all over the clothes and skin of their latest enemy at the time – an ugly old gremlin who seemed pretty intent on kidnapping Allison and making her its pet – and nobody got covered in black boils. The gremlin melted before their eyes, steaming and hissing, and Stiles looked satisfied.

“I don’t like going into that store,” Derek mutters, which is true. It’s full of things that give him the absolute fucking creeps.

Magic, generally, gives him the fucking creeps. By all counts, Stiles existing and being a witch that hoards things like petrified snake eyes on his bedroom dresser and knows how to make fire come out of his fingertips – that should creep him out on principle alone.

But there’s something about the way Stiles does magic. How he furrows his brow and rolls up his sleeves and smirks, crackles his fingers with green sparks, makes lights that haven’t worked in decades turn on, grows grass in tiny patches and uses it for pillows, holds sun in the palm of his hand. 

How he can make anything he wants to happen. How he smiles when he does it right, eyes crinkling at the corners. There’s just nothing about that that makes Derek feel creeped out. Quite the contrary – it makes him want Stiles to touch him with those green lights from his fingers. It makes him want to know how the magic tastes on Stiles’ tongue when he speaks a spell. 

Bubonic Rats and other oddities aside, Stiles is that thing in Derek’s life that he could never quite get nailed down. It’s like smoke, being around him sometimes. 

“Just go in and buy him something and attach a note that says, like, I don’t know,” she flips a curl over her shoulder, “let’s bone.”

Derek looks up at the sky and purses his lips. Doesn’t dignify that with a response. There’s no way in hell Derek is going to attach some dinky little note to Stiles’ gift that is either as crass as Erica’s suggestion or as humiliating as something he could come up with himself – no fucking way in hell.

But she does have a point. Stiles’ birthday is coming and Derek is shit out of luck and shit out of ideas for ways to make Stiles see him as anything more than just _Derek_. The way Stiles looks at him sometimes, it’s like he has no fucking idea. 

“Look. You’ve been so into him for _so long_ , and I know you think.” She pauses for a second, looks at him really steadily in the sunlight, in that knowing way she has that makes Derek’s skin crawl. “…I know how you think about yourself. But just once, step out of the comfort zone.”

The comfort zone, Derek thinks. The zone where Derek sometimes can’t look Stiles directly in the eyes. The place in between them where the words he won’t say linger in the air and Stiles can’t hear them, can’t see them, when he hears and sees everything else. The cold of Derek’s pillow when he lies down at night and stares at his ceiling and thinks of him. 

The comfort zone is exhausting.

****

The bell ting-tings above Derek’s head as he walks in, and briefly startles him into thinking it’s magic – but it’s not. It’s just a bell, and it rings like it’s supposed to, and then it rings again when the door shuts behind him and he’s standing there alone in the magic shop. It smells like dead things and incense and a little bit Stiles, if he focuses on it hard enough. He doesn’t know if it’s because Stiles spends so much time in here, gently running his fingers over the wares he can’t afford just yet reverently and lurking in the back room where the Black Magic and hardcore shit the owner won’t sell to amateurs lies in wait. Or if it’s because the room smells of magic, and Stiles does as well. 

The first thing he sees when he chances a few steps inside is a long table lined with crystal balls and tapestries, sticks of jasmine incense, pendants of painted eyes. He frowns at it. Stiles does have a crystal ball, as luck would have it, but it’s not like one of these. These are marketed to teenage girls who want a paper weight that’s edgy – Stiles’ is the real thing. It glows when he puts his hands on it and speaks sometimes, if Stiles asks it the right question.

Derek remembers once, Stiles picking it up and the light inside of it going purple, then pink, then yellow, like it was trying to communicate through color alone. Stiles held it close to his face, cocked his head to the side, and whispered something right against the surface of it. It pulsed, the lights fizzling, and it spoke in a voice that made the hairs on the back of Derek’s neck stand on end. 

He wonders if Stiles is powerful enough to even make these toys in front of him work like that. And then he’s sure that he is. 

All the same, this is kid’s stuff, and Stiles would slap on a fake smile and thank Derek all polite and necessary if he were given anything from this particular table, so he moves forward. There’s a shelf full of petrified this and thats, lizards and starfish and seahorses. Derek remembers that Stiles likes seahorses; but then he also remembers he’s likely a fan of them being _alive_ , for the most part, and moves along from there. 

As he’s leaning over a display of candles, each one with a hand written label that toots about certain different properties (romance, envy, hatred…), he gets that creeping feeling up from his spine to the back of his neck, like someone is watching him.

He half expects to see nothing and no one there, just the magic playing tricks on his brain, but instead, there’s a woman standing there giving him a smile. Derek has only stepped inside a handful of times, dragged in half kicking and screaming by Stiles’ insistence, but he recognizes this woman as the owner. She’s got that look about her that even if Derek had never seen her before, he’d know she was a witch.

She’s got diamonds sparkling in her ears and a gentle way about her, a long dress and kind, knowing eyes. She says, “you’re Stiles’ friend.”

“Er,” Derek nearly knocks a candle marked _love wax #5_ over into the rest in a domino effect, but quickly catches it at the last second, clearing his throat. “Yes, yeah.” 

She cocks her head to the side, just slightly, and takes a long second to just… _look at him_. It’s something like the way Stiles can look at people sometimes. Like he can see everything, like he knows everything, like he can locate the exact location of your still-beating heart and tear it out, if he wanted to. It unnerves the ever living hell out of Derek. Shy he has never been, not a day in his life, but he has to avoid direct eye contact with her for a moment, uncomfortable as shit. 

She says, “his birthday is soon. You’re getting him a gift.”

Derek has no fucking idea if she knows that because Stiles signed up for some kind of birthday coupon, or if she just… _knows_ that. Honestly, he doesn’t want to think about it anymore than he has to. “I’m not very good at getting gifts,” he admits, and she casts her eyes behind him to the candles Derek was seriously fucking considering.

“I can see that.” 

The insult is there, but Derek doesn’t even feel that put out about it. She’s right, either way. There’s another moment of silence, and then she stands up a bit straighter, so the wooden beaded bracelets she has on her wrists clink together. 

“I’m very good at getting gifts,” she says a bit more kindly with a conspirational wink, “and I know Stiles as well as you. I could help.”

Seeing absolutely no other options, he nods his head a bit helplessly. Hopefully she doesn’t tell Stiles about this entire charade the next time he comes in, but honestly, this woman could be his second very best friend after Scott and she’ll tell him every last fucking detail. He lets the humiliation waft over him like a pall, and watches as she takes a single stop off in a certain direction, before stopping abruptly. 

“What are you hoping this gift will say?”

Derek blinks at her. “I’d love it if weren’t a talking inanimate object.” 

She laughs, full body, like he’s the most amusing person she’s ever met. Likely, every dumbass like Derek who comes bumbling in here looking for a gift for their magically inclined friend or sibling or whatever is the most amusing person she’s ever met. “That’s not what I meant. But noted. I meant, the message you want to send.”

“The message,” Derek repeats.

“Good gifts are like letters. Some say, I value your friendship. Others, I hate you with every last inch of my innards.”

“Jesus,” Derek raises his eyebrows. “I just…I want.” 

She raises her eyebrows, waiting for him to continue. What gets him the most about this entire situation is that something tells him she already knows what it is Derek wants the gift to _say_. 

And Derek wants it to say that he’s waited a long time. That he’s been wanting…something. That Stiles is the only person who Derek would trust with his entire life, even above Scott. She knows that. He can tell. She just wants him to say it. 

“Something special,” is what he grits out from between his teeth, and she smiles, all knowing and haughty. She motions with her hand over towards the counter, and next to an old register that looks like it was made in 1923, there is a glass display case where their finest wares must be held and lodged. She goes around the back, places her palm on the top layer of glass, and smiles at him.

“Jewelry is a statement.” 

It certainly is. Derek is hesitant at first, because jewelry is what he buys for his sisters and for Lydia, and all he can think about is diamond rings and sparkly earrings. But he leans over the display case anyway, and sees that that’s not exactly what she has in her case. 

As he looks at all of it, he realizes that Stiles does wear jewelry. He has all these necklaces; a tiny terrarium in a very small glass mason jar that has sand and plants inside of it on a long chain, and a silver cross that makes no sense to Derek whatsoever but that he never questions, and other oddities that Derek can’t even really describe. 

He scans over the rings and comes to the necklaces, all the way at the front, so he has to squat down to get a better look at them. There are old tree branches on chains and odd pendants with markings and engravings in languages no one speaks anymore, but his eyes are naturally drawn to one in specific. 

It’s amethyst, he thinks. He knows for a fact that Stiles has an amethyst collection in a box under his bed somewhere, touting about how it keeps bad nightmares and ugly thoughts away when he goes to sleep at night, and cocks his head to the side as he looks closer at the necklace in question. 

It's a stone on a long silver chain. Simple. Derek can picture Stiles wearing it. He looks up to where the shop owner is watching him very intently, and points at the necklace in the case. “This one,” he says, sure.

“That one,” she repeats, no inflection in her voice. She seems to consider it for a moment, like she’s unsure and somewhat trepidatious about it, but then she smiles a bit tightly and produces a key from out of nowhere, unlocking the back of the case and sliding the door open. She bends down and her long fingers snatch the necklace up, pulling it out to hold up in the air between where she and Derek stand. “This is a very special artifact.”

“Does it have like,” he waves his hand around in the air for a moment, “properties or something?”

She meets his eyes. “In a way,” is what she says, cryptically. “It’s very old.”

“Old is good,” he says, and then reaches for his wallet in his back pocket. “How much?” 

“For a friend of Stiles’?” She smiles at him, all teeth, almost menacing. “Nothing. Take it.” 

Derek is skeptical for a moment, waiting to see if she’ll rescind her offer. “I’ve got money,” he says, opening up his wallet to show her his credit card, but she waves him off again. 

“I’ll wrap it up.” She vanishes into the back room with the necklace dangling from two fingers, and Derek raises his eyebrows and slides his wallet back into his pocket. That’s just fine by him. 

He walks out of that store with a paper bag filled with a yard of tissue paper, crinkling along on the sidewalk, and feels like he’s finally gone and done it. He’s finally gotten something for Stiles that he’s _sure_ beyond sure that he’ll like, if not even love. 

If he notices the way the bag feels heavy, way too heavy in his hand, or the way the wrapped box makes his fingers tingle uncomfortably when he pulls it out and sets it on his dresser, he pays it no mind. It’s just magic, he reminds himself. 

It’s all just magic.

***

The surprise party for Stiles is in three days, and Derek has been sitting on that stupid little box in his room for two entire days now. It sits on his dresser and seems like it hums, sometimes waking him up in the middle of the night. He’ll sit up and glare at it for seconds at a time, but then it just sits there, harmless and quiet, and Derek will go back to sleep and wake up in the morning to find it in the exact spot he left it in last. 

He knows it’s not because it’s evil. He knows it’s simply because the waiting, and the stress, and the pressure of having it is driving him absolutely fucking insane. He’ll sit there sometimes imagining giving it to Stiles, what Stiles’ reaction will be, and his leg starts tapping of its own accord, anxiety chewing away at his brain cells. 

This is insane, he’ll think, glancing at the box sitting on his dresser in the middle of the day, frowning at it. It’s just a fucking birthday present. 

All the same, by the third day, Derek is waltzing into Stiles’ house uninvited and unannounced and hunting him down to the kitchen, where he’s sitting with Scott poring over a couple of old books. He looks up at Derek’s arrival, smiles at him all genuine, and says, “hey. What are you –“

“Here,” Derek grunts, practically throwing the tiny package down in front of where Stiles is sitting. Scott zeroes in on it like predator catching prey, mouth slowly splitting into a huge grin, and quickly looks between Derek and Stiles again and again, ecstatic. It would seem that everyone knows exactly how Derek feels and has always felt about Stiles, except for Stiles himself. The irony and the drama and the fucking stupidity of it all. “Happy birthday.”

Stiles looks up at him with raised eyebrows, that same smile still on his face. “My birthday is two days away.” 

“Well.” Is all Derek says, and then he crosses his arms over his chest and shrugs. Stiles knows, because he knows Derek so well, that that’s all Derek will have to say on the matter, so he just looks down at the small box and then picks it up with black painted fingernails. He holds it for a second, and then looks up to Derek again with an even bigger, more incredulous smile.

“ _You_ went to the magic shop?” It sounds accusatory, his fingers running over the golden sticker with the name of the shop emblazoned on it. “While I have to drag you in there under threat of bodily harm, you just walked in there of your own accord?” 

Derek lifts his eyes to the ceiling. He cannot do this. He’s going to jump out the fucking window. 

“Open it,” Scott pushes him, again doing that very obvious looking between them again and again thing, nearly vibrating out of his seat. 

Stiles smiles at them both, chipping away at the corner of some of the wrapping with a blunt fingernail. “I bet I know what this is,” he winks in Derek’s direction and smiles even bigger. “Fifty dollar gift card here I come.” 

“That’s not what –“ but Stiles is still tearing at the packaging, and Derek shuts up. 

“I know everyone else says gift cards are impersonal or whatever the hell,” he’s got all the paper off so all that’s left is a white box, simple and small. He puts his fingers on the edges, like he’s about to open it, and then pauses, and Derek nearly seizures out. “But personally, I’m a fan. I mean, a gift card –“ he pulls the top off, so it clatters down on top of the table, and Derek palms his face. There’s tissue paper, purple and sparkly, and Stiles gently paws it aside. “…it’s like being given a free pass to spend your money on myself. It’s…this.” He pauses, and there it is, in plain sight.

Scott leans over to get a look at it himself, and his eyebrows nearly vanish into his hairline with surprise. 

“…is not a fucking gift card,” Stiles finishes in a low voice once enough time has passed. While Stiles is focused on staring down at it, half slack-jawed, Scott gives Derek the thumbs up over Stiles’ oblivious head, and then a very exaggerated wink that scrunches half his face up. 

“No, it is not,” Derek agrees, his face feeling hot. 

Stiles gently picks the necklace up with two fingers, so it hangs in the air right in front of his eyes for him to look at. “Derek,” he says, and Derek has never, never in his life, heard Stiles say his name like that. It’s all soft and surprised and pleased, and Derek files it away in his head like a voice memo to replay it later, again and again and again. “Derek, wow. This is…” he looks up, meets Derek’s eyes finally, and Derek has his thumb over his mouth in a nervous tic. 

Without saying another word, Stiles is standing up from his chair, coming straight for him. Derek doesn’t know what to do, so he mostly just stands still, paralyzed almost, and then Stiles has got his arms around him. Stiles is a neck hugger, pressing his chin into Derek’s shoulder and squeezing tight. Derek is stuck for a moment; because he and Stiles have hugged before, sure, but not like this. 

This one feels different. Derek wraps his arms around Stiles’ middle and squeezes back, tries to say something in the hold of his fingers.

But Stiles pulls away and smiles at him right in his face, so close, _so close_. Derek can only glance at his lips and fantasize for a second about being brave enough to lean in, just kiss him, just _do it_. Derek can face monsters, and he can be a leader for his pack when they need him, and he can run head first into battle and not look back.

Apparently, however, kissing Stiles Stilinski requires bravery farther beyond what he’s capable of. Stiles steps out of his hold and quickly drapes the necklace around his neck, letting it fall against his chest. He caresses it with his fingers for a moment, smiling and meeting Derek’s eyes again. “This is better than a gift card,” he says, so serious and honest Derek has to believe it. “I only said all that stuff to make you feel good if you had gotten me a gift card.” 

“Oh,” Derek says. He doesn’t know what else to say. 

“It’s so interesting,” he goes on, picking it up and examining it some more, like he can’t take his eyes off of it. Derek preens underneath his contentment with the gift. 

“Yeah, I saw it,” he clears his throat and tries to sound all confident and nonchalant, even while Scott is sitting there grinning at the two of them like an idiot. “I know you like amethyst, so…”

Stiles looks up at him, his brows furrowing. Then, he quickly smiles again. “That’s thoughtful. And it’s so cool, I love it,” he drops the stone down on his chest and shrugs. “But this isn’t amethyst.”

Derek is surprised. He looks closer at the stone for a moment, leaning his neck down to try and get a better look at it. “What?”

“I mean, I don’t care whether it is or isn’t,” Stiles goes on. “This is a really different purple than any amethyst I’ve seen. It’s almost…” he looks at it again, picking it up with his fingers – the color of it is stark against his dark nail polish, and Derek swallows. “…I don’t know. I’d have to look it up.” 

“I really thought it was amethyst,” Derek is bizarrely disappointed about this, even though Stiles clearly still likes it either way. 

“I like it so much,” Stiles assures him, reaching out to squeeze Derek’s shoulder just once. “I can’t believe you got this for me.”

“Yeah,” Derek says, again at a loss for anything else. “Happy birthday.” 

“You,” Stiles starts as he settles back down in his seat again, “are such a secret softy. I love it.”

Derek looks at the phases of the moon that Stiles has tattooed in a band around his left bicep, thinks of how Derek was the one who suggested it and Stiles just went in and got it done without a second thought. Derek had meant it as a pack thing, as a suggestion that Stiles belongs to wolves and that wolves belong to him, but he never told Stiles that. He wonders if Stiles knew and did it anyway. 

“Very cool,” Scott says, slow and precise and knowing, and Derek has to resist the urge to walk across the linoleum floor and smack him upside his head.

“I just like it so much,” Stiles sighs, picking it up in his fingers again, and Derek thinks he might have managed, just this once, to say something with a gift. 

_Do you get it?_ Derek asks in his head as he watches Stiles turn the stone side to side, almost reverently. _Do you understand?_

****

“I had the weirdest dream last night,” Stiles says around a bite of an apple, leg propped up on the picnic bench. He’s got the necklace on and it shimmers a bit in the sunlight, and Derek stares at how it looks against his pale skin and collarbones. “I was in a tomb.”

“Dead?” Scott asks, and Derek drums his fingers on the tabletop.

“Alive,” he corrects, licking apple juice off his wrist. “That was the fucked up bit. I was in this tomb all mummified but I was a living mummy. Which is an oxymoron.” 

“I thought that weirdo box of rocks under your bed kept nightmares away,” Scott gives him a look – Stiles has always had a bit of a problem with nightmares, ever since he was a little kid. It’s something to do with the magic, he always says. It’s not always very nice. 

“The weirdo box of rocks has done me well for years,” he squints into the sunlight, and then picks up the stone around his neck and caresses it gently with his thumb. Like it being there is comforting or something, and Derek stares and feels all self-satisfied. “Maybe I need to update it, or something. That being said, mummies are cool. I think they’re one of my favorite spooks. Derek?” 

Derek blinks, startled. He had been staring so hard at Stiles’ fingers toying with Derek’s gift that he had sort of forgotten that he was – well. Staring. It must have been pretty intensely, because both of the other boys at the table are looking at him, blinking a few times each. 

“What’s your favorite?”

“My favorite,” he repeats, looking between both of them. Scott looks at him with that stupid fucking smile, all knowing and annoying, but Stiles just looks back at him, a glint in his eyes. 

“Spook. What’s your favorite spook?” 

“Define spook,” Derek looks away from Stiles’ eyes, particularly bright and enticing in the sunlight. 

“Like, halloweeny thing. Vampire, alien, mummy….”

Making a face, Derek shakes his head. “Can’t say I’m partial to any spooks, Stiles. They annoy.” 

“Come on,” Stiles smiles at him with all his teeth, so his nose scrunches up in that adorable way it does that makes Derek want to lean in and kiss him really badly. “Mummies are badass. They die, get wrapped up and embalmed, and then rise up for revenge. They’re like haunted rolls of toilet paper.” 

“They’re vindictive and will kill you given half the chance.” 

Stiles finger-guns at him. “With their quarter mile per hour walking speed, they’re a real threat to homeland security.” 

Derek rolls his eyes, but he has a smile on his face, one that he tries to hide behind his hand. Truth be told, one of Derek’s favorite things about Stiles is how weird he is, and the weird interests he has. He likes mummies, and no matter how stupid and inane and slightly bizarre it is, he doesn’t care. It’s the most attractive thing in the world, to be a person who knows who they are.

****

Derek’s phone buzzes him awake at four in the morning. He’s been a textbook light sleeper for as long as he can remember now, so the rattling of his water glass as his phone nearly buzzes itself off his bedside table wakes him instantly, and he frowns, groggy. He sits up, reads the time on his clock and grumbles, and then checks the caller ID.

It’s Stiles. Immediately, he’s awake. When Stiles calls him in the day time it’s enough to give him a bit of a start, but now? At four in the morning? A four in the morning call from Stiles can only mean one thing – something bad. 

He immediately answers it, pressing it to his ear and rasping out a fevered, “Stiles?”

“Yeah,” he says, and he sounds – upset. Not necessarily like death is gripping him by his neck or anything, but upset all the same. “Sorry to call late. I woke you up.”

“It’s fine,” he says, sitting all the way up in his bed and propping himself back against his pillows. “Everything okay?”

Stiles sighs, long and shaky on the other line. Derek tightens his grip on his sheets from nerves. “I just – I had that nightmare again?” 

“Oh,” Derek blinks, surprised. “The mummy?” 

“The mum- _me_ ,” Stiles says, and Derek gets the joke without even having to look Stiles in the face to really understand the inflection of it. “I know it sounds stupid.”

“It doesn’t,” Derek promises. 

“Just. You know. It’s not even the nightmare itself. Like, yeah, it creeps me out and I wake up in a cold sweat and all that, which is not cool, but – I don’t know. I thought I’d fixed the nightmare problem.” A nervous, self-deprecating laugh. “I thought I’d freed myself from the torment. I was getting used to sleeping through the night.” 

Derek palms his forehead and tries to think of something to say. It amazes him, it really does, that out of all the people Stiles could’ve called in the wake of having a scary dream, he decided to call Derek. It makes something warm settle in his chest to think that he’s the first person that Stiles would think to call in a moment of distress. 

And also, Derek thinks it’s pretty dumb of him, because Derek can’t comfort anybody. Barely himself, even. “Did you try to update the box of rocks?” 

“I did,” he says, ominous. “It didn’t work. Maybe – I don’t know. I’m just anxious.” There’s a shuffling noise on the other line, like Stiles moving around in his sheets. “I don’t really wanna talk about it anymore. I know it’s late, but uh…would you just. Talk to me? For a while?” 

Derek breathes out. “About what?” 

“Anything,” Stiles’ voice is breathy and short. 

“Um. Okay,” he tries to think of something interesting to distract Stiles with. Looks around his bedroom and just sees the usual boring nothing, his bedside table and his dresser and his closet, a little unorganized since the last time he did his laundry and got it all in order. The immediate, first thing that comes to mind is _do you know that I’m pretty much in love with you_ , which would definitely get the job of distracting Stiles done in a heartbeat. But he’s not brave enough, so he swallows it down and settles on something else. “I found a gift card for Coldstone Creamery on the sidewalk today. Or, yesterday.”

“Holy shit,” Stiles says. It sounds sarcastic, so it likely is. “Was there money on it?” 

“Ten dollars.”

“That is enough for two cones, my friend. Since you told _me_ , that means I get the second one.” 

“Of course,” Derek agrees. “How about uh – on your birthday. I’ll take you.” 

“Fuck yeah. Cookies and cream here I come.” 

Derek wonders if Stiles has any idea, any whatsoever, that Derek more or less just asked him out on a date. More likely than not, he hasn’t any clue.

****

On the day before Stiles’ surprise party, Derek is put in charge of going to the party store and gathering cups and plates and napkins and silverware – the plastic and paper kind with fun or stupid designs on them. It seems counterproductive to put Derek on the party planning committee, seeing as how his idea of a party is alcohol and pizza and passing out on the couch, but all the same, Scott and Erica had insisted, so here he is. 

He buys everything in black because it’s Stiles’ favorite everything, as he’ll gleefully inform anyone who asks. “I’m a witch,” he’ll say, all pomp and circumstance, like it’s the same as being the President. “Black is my shade.” 

It looks more like a Halloween party when Derek looks into his cart and sees it all lined up there – black cups and plates, black utensils, black streamers, and some black balloons that he’ll likely be tasked with blowing up himself. That’s probably exactly how Stiles likes it, so he calls it a job well done and heads over to Stiles’ house. 

Stiles’ Jeep is not present, but the Sheriff’s car and Scott’s are, so Derek pulls up behind them in the long driveway and gathers his rustling plastic bags. They beckon him inside as soon as he’s at the door, and then Scott is upon him. 

“Let me look at what you got,” he demands, grabbing at Derek’s bags even as they’re hooked onto his forearm and wrist. He pulls out the black cups and studies them, drops them back into the bag, and then the black plates, and the black everything else. He looks pleased, giving Derek another one of those smirky looks. 

Of course Derek got the right stuff, Scott must be thinking. Everyone else is his friend, but Derek is the one who’s obsessed with him, according to popular opinion. 

“He has no idea,” Scott says over his shoulder, leading him into the kitchen. Derek rustles along behind him, and the Sheriff offers him a cup of coffee which he politely declines. “He has no fucking idea!” 

“Which is the point of a surprise party,” Derek reminds him, while Scott meanders into the laundry room, where an old and barely used closet door is sitting. 

Scott opens it up, and reveals the rest of the party supplies they’ve been hiding away for the past week, unbeknownst to Stiles. There’s a cardboard cutout of a dopey looking ghost they got at Wal Mart which Stiles will laugh at and like a lot, some of those really annoying party poppers that Stiles likes, some silly string, and a couple of bags of non-perishable groceries. Alcohol is also a big factor. 

Derek bends over and drops his bags gently into any open spaces he can find, while Scott holds the door open for him and snickers quietly to himself, probably imagining the look on Stiles’ face when he comes home to his party. It is a pretty enticing thought, Derek has to agree. It’s satisfying to pull a prank by any other name on Stiles for once, instead of the other way around. 

He’s just dumping the last of it into the closet when the front door bangs open, and Stiles’ voice rings out loud and clear. “Where’s the party?” He demands, and Scott nearly seizures.

He tries to the slam the door closed while Derek is still crouched down in the doorway, eliciting a more annoyed than genuinely hurt, “ _ow_ , Jesus fucking Christ!” 

Scott kicks him a few times to get him out of the way, pretty hard as a matter of fact, and Derek has no choice but to dive onto his ass and crawl backwards out of the way of the door. Stiles’ footsteps approach, quick and sure, and there’s chaos for five seconds. Scott slams the door shut and trips over Derek in his haste to get away from the incriminating evidence, nearly falls on his face but catches himself at the last second, while Derek desperately tries to right himself.

Throughout the entire thing, the Sheriff just sits there sipping his coffee and watching, no help whatsoever. 

Blessedly, Derek manages to stand up and spill back out into the kitchen along with Scott, right on time. Stiles is just rounding the corner into the room when they emerge, huffing and puffing and a bit dusty from the linen closet, but generally innocent looking nonetheless.

Stiles smiles at them, putting his hands on his hips. “What are you guys doing here?” 

Scott says, “nothing,” at the same time that Derek says, “information.” 

They look at each other, and Stiles blinks at them, cocking his head to the side. “Nothing information,” he repeats, voice very even as a slow smile spreads across his face. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with my birthday, would it?” 

They speak at the same time again. Derek says, “what?” and Scott says, “it’s your birthday?” 

Stiles looks at them both very critically, tapping his fingers on his hips. He’s wearing the necklace again, and it seems to be a slightly different color than it was before. Before, it was a light purple, almost pink in certain lights. Now it’s almost…glowing. A hotter pink, much hotter. Derek doesn’t know if it does that, or if Stiles has noticed it or not. 

“All right,” he finally says, but he looks pleased. He knows damn well they’re here doing something for his birthday, but he won’t press the matter any farther than that. “Well, since you’re not _doing anything_ , sit with me and my dad and have coffee.” 

Before either of them can say anything, he’s pulling three mugs out of the cupboard and setting them down on the counter next to the pot, digging around in the fridge for the creamer and milk and pouring steaming coffee. Derek clears his throat and rubs at the back of his neck. 

Stiles pours milk and one sugar into the first mug, and hands it to Derek with a smile. “How you like it,” he says, and Derek takes it and tries to ignore the fluttering feeling in his chest that he gets at the fact that Stiles knows how he likes his coffee. 

“Thanks,” his voice is quiet, nervous. 

In Scott’s, he dumps coconut creamer and three packets of sugar, so it’s more syrup than coffee, and Derek isn’t even surprised. He sips his coffee and it’s perfect, it’s great, like everything else Stiles does, and leans back up against the counter. Stiles pulls a chair out next to his father and sits, poking around in the newspaper he’s got lying spread out across the table. 

“Arts and leisure,” his dad says, pulling out a specific section of the paper without having to look up from his own. 

“My brand,” Stiles rips the paper out of his hands and sets it down in front of him, leaning over it and pressing his knuckles to his cheek, the black of his nails stark against his pale skin. “Do you guys like any sections of the paper?” 

“I didn’t know people still read the paper,” Derek says honestly. He can’t remember the last time he even picked one up, so much as actually took the time to read it. 

“Dad and I are old-fashioned,” Stiles explains with a wink over his shoulder, shaking out the paper so it’s bigger. “We like the smell of old books and getting ink on our fingertips.” 

As he leans farther over the paper, Derek notes that the stone is really, _really_ glowing now. It’s emitting a bit of light, and it looks like it’d be hot to the touch. But it just sits there against Stiles’ skin, exposed by the tanktop he’s wearing. 

“Uh,” Derek starts, clearing his throat. Stiles looks at him, even though Derek hasn’t even really said anything. “Your necklace. It’s…”

Stiles looks down, blinks, and then raises his eyebrows. He collects the thing in his fingers, while everybody watches him, and turns it this way and that. “Huh,” he intones. He looks like he’s a bit mystified. “I don’t remember it glowing before.” 

Derek is instantly nervous. Magic in general tends to make him nervous, a lot like a dog running into a ghost or something, but _that_ in specific? Weird glowing little stone that he personally bought and had Stiles hang around his neck?

That makes him fucking nervous. Stiles just observes it for a couple of seconds, and the glow pulses a bit the longer he holds it in his fingers. “It looks like it’s…” he squeezes it, full palm around it, and when he pulls it away, it’s glowing even brighter. “…feeding of my magic, or something.”

“ _Feeding_?” Derek half-shouts this. “ _Feeding_?” 

“Just using it to do something,” Stiles corrects, sensing that that was the wrong word to use. He holds it for longer, as if he has no sense of self-preservation whatsoever, and Derek nearly drops his mug of coffee in his haste to rush across the room.

He rips the thing out of Stiles’ hand and it burns him. It’s a lot like how it feels when he puts his hand on uncut wolfsbane. He pulls back, yelping, and it flops back down onto Stiles’ collarbones. It, for whatever reasons, seems to not be that interested in burning him. Stiles stares down at the thing on his skin in the wake of this, while the Sheriff has put his coffee and newspaper down, a little startled. 

“Huh.” Stiles does that sound again, and Derek nearly loses his mind. 

“Take that thing off,” Derek demands, and Stiles looks at him like he’s honestly confused. 

“We don’t know it’s doing anything _bad_ ,” he contends, and then actually tries to pick it up with his hand again. Derek reaches out and slaps it away, the sound loud in his ears, and Stiles gives him this terribly affronted look, all wide eyes and parted lips. “Why are you _freaking out_?” 

“That thing is –“

Scott, for the first time in what seems like several minutes, pipes up from the kitchen window. He’s staring out, so the fading sunlight casts his skin in an ethereal orange glow. He says, “hey, guys,” and all three other men in the room turn to look at him. He points out the window, brow furrowed. “There’s someone in the yard.” 

“It’s probably my nosy neighbor,” the Sheriff says, standing from his chair with a grind on the linoleum. He waltzes right up to the window and peers out, a deep frown on his face. Then, he cocks his head to the side. “That’s not my neighbor.” 

Derek almost doesn’t want to go to the window to see who it is. He knows, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that it’s going to be bad, and he’s not going to like it. And worst of all, he knows that it’s because he bought Stiles that stupid fucking necklace.

He had asked that woman at the store, point blank, if it had any properties. She had said, cryptically and in hindsight damningly, _in a way_. 

When Derek walks up to the window and sees what he sees, he briefly thinks about walking to that stupid fucking magic store, dismantling it brick by board and board by board, kicking at the piles he’ll make with its infrastructure. This is unforgivable.

Stiles sidles up behind him, so they’re all four crowding around the window like a bunch of fucking weirdos, and he gasps. “Fuck!” He shouts, so loud it almost grates in Derek’s ears. “The mummy from my nightmares!”

“A mummy,” the Sheriff repeats. This might be unacceptable to him, on some level, but he better get to accepting it – because it’s coming closer. As Stiles had said before, at a quarter mile an hour walking speed. It limps along in the yard, coming directly for the house, and they all just stand there, flabbergasted, staring at it. 

“That’s him!” Stiles points, as if they’re not already all looking at it. “It’s a real live mummy!” 

“This is _cool_ to you?” Derek demands, feeling his face turn downwards from top to bottom – eyebrows caving in, mouth frowning. “That thing –“

“That thing is a he,” Stiles corrects him with a finger point in the air, and then squints when he looks at it bumbling along toward the house for another moment. “Or, a she. They really wrapped those guys up tight, back then.” 

“What do we do?” Scott demands, and the mummy gets closer, and closer, and closer. Stiles stands there, scratches at his temple and frowns, and shrugs his shoulders.

“We don’t know he necessarily wants to hurt us, in anyway.” The thing is approaching the patio. “Mummies are very tortured souls, you know. I read this book once about them – where there are a bunch of them who were, like, wrongfully killed in totally crazy, barbaric ways. I think it’s unfair to just _assume_ he wants us dead.” 

Onto the patio it comes, and it catches the sunlight much better here than at the edge of the trees. And, yeah. Holy shit. That’s a fucking mummy. Its bandages or whatever the hell you’d call them are all grimy and nasty looking, it smells to such a degree Derek cannot describe it, and its eyes are just…black. Derek takes an involuntary step back at the sight of it, as do the Sheriff and Scott.

Until Stiles is the one standing closet to the window, cocking his head to the side and observing it. Slowly, the Sheriff reaches into his holster and pulls out his gun. It clicks, so Stiles turns with his lips parted, brow furrowed.

He looks mad. It’s unbelievable. 

“You’re not _shooting_ the mummy, dad,” he tries to reach forward and actually get his hands on his father’s fucking firearm. Luckily for all of them, the Sheriff must be used to that kind of behavior from Stiles, because he dodges Stiles’ hand lighting quick. 

“I will shoot the mummy,” he answers, and then licks his lips. This is fucking insane. 

“He could just want my help,” he points to himself, and Derek watches behind Stiles’ head as the mummy vanishes from the window, so close to the house now it’s practically inside. “Shooting every supernatural thing on sight is what hunters do. That’s not what –“

Before he can finish that sentence, the doorknob for the back door rattles. With the curtain pulled over the window, of the door, the only thing any of them can see is the mummy’s very tall, very broad silhouette in the fading sunlight. The door rattles, and rattles, and Stiles clears his throat. As if he’s getting ready to give a big speech to this thing that probably (most certainly) does not speak English and might not even have a _tongue_ or ears to listen. 

He takes a step forward, with the clear intent of opening that door and letting it inside, but he never actually gets the chance.

The mummy bulldozes his way through the wooden door as if it’s nothing. From what Derek could tell, with it all happening so fast, the thing had _headbutted_ his way inside. It used its fucking head to break a solid wooden door, and then it bumbles inside on heavy footfalls, like that was nothing to it. 

“Holy shit, holy shit,” Stiles chants, and finally, for the first time since this all started, looks concerned. For fucking God’s sake. 

“God, it fucking _reeks_!” Scott yells around a coughing fit behind them. It does, at that. It smells like something that burrowed under a mound of dirt to die and has just been unearthed. 

The mummy groans. This is how it communicates. It sets its eyes on Stiles, big and black and menacing, and _groooannnsss_. If Derek had to assign an emotion to it, he’d call it accusatory. It points a shriveled up mummy finger in Stiles’ direction, vindictive and harsh, and ambles its way towards him. 

Its footsteps are heavy, like stomps, that rattle the windows. It’s a six foot tall mummy. Derek is stunned for a suspended five seconds, watching it groan and point and come for Stiles, and Scott might be passed out somewhere behind him. 

But the Sheriff lifts his gun and shoots it – point blank, in the heart. Or, where the heart would be. The bullet hits it, and it pauses for a second. 

It looks down, slow as a glacier, and cocks its head to the side. They all stand there with baited breath, and Derek remembers that at the time when this thing was a real person, there was no such thing as guns. This is an Ancient Egyptian relic from before Biblical times. It blows his mind. 

It just looks at the bullet hole, oozing black puss now, and then looks back up at Stiles. Stiles stands there, hands held out from his body, eyes wide. It groans again, louder, and jerks forward with its hand outstretched.

It just manages to lock its hand around Stiles’ neck, squeezing and lifting him up into the air so Stiles’ feet kick wildly as his fingers scrabble to get the hand off his neck, and then Derek finally becomes unparalyzed. He leaps forward, while Stiles chokes and coughs and tries to kick the mummy in the general area of where its balls would be – to no good use. 

Going after Stiles’ neck was wise. This thing might not know a lot, but it seems to know that Stiles is a witch. Making it so he can’t speak is vital to kill him, and Derek tries not to think about that. 

Derek grabs him, and then Scott is there, thankfully not passed out like Derek had assumed he would be. Scott tries to grab at its arm, tries to pry it off Stiles, but it uses its other arm to just _knock_ him upside his head. 

Scott goes down hard, harder than Derek has ever seen. “Fuck,” he shouts from the ground, staggering to get back up on his feet. “It’s strong as shit.” 

Stiles tries to kick it again, but it does nothing. Derek figures, from Scott’s example, that just charging at it with werewolf strength isn’t going to get the job done. He looks around himself for something, anything, the sound of Stiles’ desperate attempts to breathe setting his teeth on edge and making the entire thing more frantic – and he stumbles upon a heavy cast iron skillet. The Sheriff likely uses this to make breakfast every morning, eggs and bacon and sausage. 

Derek picks it up, wields it and tests it weight, and swings. 

He hits the thing right on its shoulder, and it’s hard enough to do _something_ , at least. It staggers back, a gruff gurgle of a noise coming from its throat, and almost trips over Scott on the floor in the process. Scott scrambles away like a dog skittering on its nails, crawling up onto his hands and knees before managing to stand. 

It doesn’t become apparent at first that Derek had taken its dead arm clean off, until it straightens itself back up and – well. Only has one arm, now. 

“ _Arm…unattached…_ ” Stiles’ voice, a cracked and broken attempt at speaking, and Derek turns. “ _…still…choking…._ ” 

Sure enough, the detached arm is apparently still sentient. Its grip is as strong as ever, and Stiles is free to back away on shaky feet to the wall, coughing and trying to punch the arm off of him. Derek moves first, frying pan still in his hand, and beats the arm as hard as he can in the center without hitting Stiles. 

The arm falls, flops to the ground like a dead log. Stiles takes in a great big huff of air, coughing still, and as he collapses to the ground in a heap, Derek notices the necklace still around his neck. 

One thing is for certain – they can beat this thing and dismantle it all they want, but it’s not going to stop. They can’t kill it. As Derek stands there, the unattached arm is using its fingers to pull itself back to its host, the mummy itself, groaning and stomping back towards Stiles again. It apparently will not rest or stop until it kills Stiles. Why it wants to do this is beyond him – until he looks at the necklace again.

Then, it’s not such a mystery. 

“Destroy that,” Derek commands, pointing to the stone around Stiles’ neck. Stiles, even after having just lived through a near death experience by a mummy hand, clasps at it protectively. “Stiles. Take it off.” 

The mummy gets closer to him, and this time, Scott doesn’t try to stop it. He stands back, claws out and ready just in case, and watches. Stiles watches as the arm climbs up the mummy’s leg and fits itself right back into its socket, like nothing had ever happened, and even he has to admit it. The mummy isn’t nice. It wants him dead. They can’t kill it. There’s only one way. 

Grudgingly, he slides the necklace off his neck and drops it down on the ground. He pushes it away from himself, and as he does, the mummy tracks it with its coal black eyes. It changes trajectories then, away from Stiles, though still with a murderous glare for him as it passes, and toward the stone. 

Before it gets the chance to pick it up and do whatever the hell it could possibly want to do with it, Derek lifts his foot, and slams it down on top of it. 

The stone cracks. The sound is loud like an avalanche in the room. It shatters into dust underfoot, and Derek lifts it up to look at his handiwork. 

As he does, the mummy in question drops to the floor. Dead. Or, more dead than it had been when it tried to kill Stiles, at least. 

“God dammit,” Stiles rasps, clutching at his neck and rubbing, a frown on his face. “I really fucking liked that necklace.”

****

Derek runs his fingers gently over the bruising on Stiles’ neck, just starting to go dark purples and ugly yellows, while Stiles angles his head for Derek to get a better look at it. It’s fine, for the most part. No gashes or cuts, and his windpipe and throat seem to be just okay. Just the bruising. “What have we learned?” He asks Stiles, standing back up to his full height and putting his hands on his hips.

Stiles narrows his eyes, but sighs. He speaks in a tight rasp. “Mummies aren’t nice,” he mutters, and then rubs at his own neck. “They’re still cool, though.”

Possibly nothing could ever happen to shake Stiles of that ill-conceived notion, so Derek just sighs. Scott and Derek had buried the thing in the woods behind Stiles’ house only twenty minutes earlier, so Derek has dirt and pine all over his clothes and a bit underneath his nails even after the scrubbing he had subjected himself to in the sink. It’s definitely dead again, no doubts about that, so Derek doesn’t worry about it rising from back to try and choke Stiles out while he sleeps. 

It really just wanted that stone. Stiles coughs a bit, leaning back in his kitchen chair and frowning. “I guess the necklace belonged to him,” he says, still prodding at his neck. “Maybe I should’ve just given it back.” 

“Let’s not rationalize the mummy.” He looks at the spot on the floor where he had crushed it with his foot. They swept it up and scattered the pieces in the wind. Stiles was upset about it, but what else were they supposed to do? “Want some hot tea or something? Ice pack, maybe?” 

Stiles gives him a lopsided smile, shrugging his shoulders. “Nah, it’s fine.”

Scuffing his shoe on the linoleum floor, Derek curls in on himself a bit. “Sorry about – you know. Now your neck is all bruised and your birthday is tomorrow.” 

“Eh,” Stiles shrugs again. “The ice cream you promised me tomorrow will make it feel better.” 

Derek’s face goes a little hot, because to Stiles it’s just getting birthday ice cream and nothing more. But Derek has been thinking about it a lot ever since he asked Stiles to go with him, and though it seems inconsequential in light of what just happened, he’s still thinking about it now. He likes to imagine that they’ll sit and talk and he’ll get confident about it because for whatever reason, Derek has a tendency to make Stiles laugh, and he’ll get brave and finally admit to Stiles how he feels. 

He knows it won’t happen. But it’s always nice to fantasize. 

“Sorry, again.” 

“For what?” 

“For all this.” 

Stiles cocks his head to the side. “I fail to see how it’s your fault.” 

How could it not be Derek’s fault? He’s the one who bought the stupid thing to begin with. And yes, it was under the advisory of that fucking psychotic magic woman at the store, but still. He practically orchestrated the entire thing. 

Stiles sees this. “You seem upset,” he analyzes, and Derek has to shake his head and look away from Stiles’ face. 

“It’s just –“ he huffs, clenching his hands into fists at his sides. “I finally get you something and I was really proud I found it and you liked it and now all this…”

Stiles gives him that look. That all-knowing, all fucking seeing look. He stands up, so they’re close as close can get, to reach out and put a hand on Derek’s shoulder, squeezing it all nice and tight. “Buddy,” he starts, and Derek wants to say _don’t fucking call me that, I don’t want to be your fucking friend_ , but he just glowers at his feet and doesn’t meet Stiles’ eyes. “I loved the necklace. Truly. And I mean, okay. So it was sorta evil. Who hasn’t ever accidentally bought someone a mummy-raising necklace?” 

Derek wants to either punch him or kiss him until he shuts the fuck up. Instead, he goes for the next best thing. “I want to know what the inside of your head is like,” he snaps, pushing Stiles’ hand off his shoulder even as the loss of contact makes him feel a little emptier. “You say the most –“

“Amazing things,” Stiles finishes for him, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Derek wants to ask him how he can stand there smiling and making jokes after what just happened – but then, that’s just Stiles. 

“I’ll get you something else,” he mutters, and Stiles waves his hand. 

“Really not necessary.”

“It won’t be evil this time,” he swears, and Stiles blinks at him for a moment. It takes him a second, but he finally nods his head and smiles, just a bit. 

“Okay. I won’t say no to a present.”

***

Derek slams his hands down on the glass counter at the magic shop, nearly shatters the entire thing, and frowns. _Glowers_ might be a stronger and, frankly, more accurate term. “Was that funny to you?” 

He receives a pair of blinking eyes and a blank slate of a face for his efforts. She looks at him, up and down, and she doesn’t seem that afraid of him at all. Nevermind the fact that he’s a six foot tall two hundred pound alpha werewolf – she just looks at him like he’s nothing more than a little kid throwing a tantrum in her place of business. “I don’t think I know what you mean,” she says diplomatically, standing behind the register and futzing with a strange looking rock in her hands. 

“Don’t play dumb.”

She stares at him some more, and Derek nearly loses his mind.

“You sold me an evil rock that nearly killed your best customer,” he throws his hands in the air, and she follows the movement with a detached interest. “Why would you – do you secretly _hate him_?” 

Now her hands go up in the air, but this time, in surrender. She says, “you picked the item yourself. It called to you.” 

Derek makes a face. It’s the type of face reserved for looking at a spider that’s just been squashed underneath a book. “A vindictive mummy called to me, and you just sat there and let it happen.” 

She shrugs, like it doesn’t even fucking matter. 

“It tried to choke him out.” 

She puts a hand over her mouth. She might be laughing, or she might be doing something even weirder than that. Either way, it makes Derek so annoyed he thinks he sees red around the edges of his vision for a moment; he has this fantasy of reaching out and swiping an entire shelf of candles onto the ground just for the thrill of it. When she takes the hand away, her mouth is a thin line, no evidence of laughter or a smile whatsoever. “Yet you came back,” she says, with all the enigma in the world. “You want something else.”

Derek shakes his head. “Not from you. I came to tell you not to go near Stiles anymore –“

As if Derek didn’t speak at all, she lifts a brow. “Where else are you going to get something for him? Wal Mart?” 

_Wal Mart_. Derek stands there, hands on the glass display case where the cursed rock came from in the first place, and grinds his teeth. Because god fucking dammit – she’s right. There’s no way that Derek could walk into any other store on planet earth aside from this one and find something even remotely close to something Stiles would want or even care for. If he went to Wal Mart he’d come out the other side with a gift card. He just fucking knows it. 

This is the only place he can get a present for Stiles. The only alternative he can think of is getting Stiles another bottle of black nailpolish, but he has about sixteen of those already. 

He puts his hand over his eyes and growls under his breath. “Has he ever –“ he starts, and then clears his throat. He came in here to rip this place to shreds and give this woman a piece of his mind, and now here he is, conceding to her point. “…mentioned something? Looked at something in particular?” 

Like the argument they were just having never happened at all, her lips curl up into a smile and she nods her head stoically. “I have some ideas.” 

“Swear to me these ideas aren’t going to raise malicious demons from the dead that’ll try to kill the recipient.” 

Another smile, this one more cunning than the last. “I swear exactly that.” 

There’s about a half a dozen reasons why Derek shouldn’t trust a single word that comes out of this woman’s mouth, but he has to remind himself that Stiles _does_ trust her. She and Stiles are friends. Stiles has most likely been the number one patron of this idiotic store for years, now. And Stiles isn’t an idiot, and he has good intuition; if someone genuinely had malicious intentions for him, he’d know by now. 

With a heaving sigh, Derek gestures two fingers. “Let’s see it.” 

She turns on her heel and makes a motion with her head that suggests Derek should follow, so he does, dragging his feet the entire way. She leads him away from the counter, across the store to a particular section he doesn’t think he’s ever had the chance to set foot in. The wooden sign hanging from ropes in the ceiling right above a series of glass shelves reads _myth_ in swirling purple script. Derek wants to vomit at the sight of the sign alone, but trudges forward if only because he knows, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that yeah. This is exactly the type of shit Stiles goes bananas for. 

“I’ve caught him salivating over this on more than one occasion,” she explains, eyeballing the shelves as she hunts for the item in question. “It’s a rare commodity, and as such is in the higher price range of anything I sell.” 

Derek nods along. Stiles’ income comes mostly from doing petty magic things for people around town and being the local pizza delivery guy. He hasn’t exactly got thousands of dollars to spend on magical bullshit, which is half the reason he lurks this store like a ghoul to begin with; looking at what he can’t have, and all that. 

She runs her fingers along a few bottles of bizarre substances, and then snatches one up quick in her bony fingers. She holds it up in the air between her and Derek, all pomp and circumstance, so Derek has to lean in and read the tag attached to the cork of the glass bottle.

It reads _unicorn blood_ , and Derek frowns. He pulls his neck back, snatches the bottle out of her hand, and shakes it a few times. She makes a noise of dismay in the back of her throat, reaching out to stop Derek from manhandling the thing as if he’s throwing precious diamonds around in the air, and Derek just shakes his head. 

He stares at the liquid moving around in the bottle for a moment, catching the dim lights in the store, and says, “this is water, elmer’s glue, and a pound of craft glitter.” 

“Unicorns are –“

“Not real.” 

She looks at him like he just might be the stupidest human person to ever walk the earth. “Stiles would disagree.” 

And, oh yeah, he would. Most likely, he believes there’s some hidden secret forest out there in some unchartered corner of the Amazonian rain forest where unicorns roam free in packs, whinnying and galloping and drinking out of crystal clear streams. He probably has some book that says all the things a person could do with the prized and almost impossible to find unicorn blood, goes all starry eyed with the possibilities, falls asleep thinking about the spells he could do if only he could get his hands on unicorn blood. 

Derek frowns even harder. “How much is this?” 

She gets a twinkle in her eye, Derek is sure of it. “Seven hundred dollars.” 

“ _Jesus_ Christ,” he breathes through his teeth, and then he shakes the stuff again. It’s the weirdest shade of lavender he’s ever seen, glittering somewhat blue in the light, and he squints hard and watches it as it goes up and down in its container. His sisters used to make glitter water out of glue and sparkles before, and even he has to admit – it didn’t move the way this stuff does. “And you’re telling me he wants this?” 

“I’m sure of it.” 

“And it’s not evil.” 

“Unicorns are some of the most benign creatures that –“

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, kumbayah,” he mutters, and wraps his fingers tighter around the bottle. To him, seven hundred dollars is pennies, in the grand scheme of things – and if nothing else, Stiles will be impressed that Derek found it. Which is a hell of a lot more than he can say for the mummy rock and everything it turned out to be. 

Feeling like a chump and like he just became a guy who willingly spends money on fairytale bullshit that likely is made in the basement of this very shop by a con artist, he grumbles and rolls his eyes. “I’ll take it.”

***

Stiles appears out of thin air. 

He materializes beside a potted ficus plant perched outside the ice cream place, sunglasses perched on his nose and a wane smile spreading across his lips. The second he shows up, sort of like fog slowly drifting into a solid mass, a couple of girls who happened to be walking past at the time jump and shriek, nearly tripping over their own feet in their haste to get away. 

Stiles pushes his glasses up on top of his head and smiles wider, scanning his eyes across the sidewalk until they finally land on where Derek is sitting on a bench, waiting for him. Stiles acts like everyone else, who is suddenly giving him a very wide berth as if Stiles has an infectious disease, doesn’t even exist. He moseys his way through the small crowd that either stops and stares at him or pointedly avoids looking directly at him, smile still on, even though he has to be able to hear what they whisper about him. 

People say a lot of things about witches in general, which Stiles has always more or less rolled his eyes at and let roll off his back like it’s nothing to him. But people say a lot of things about _Stiles_ in specifically around town – there are people who genuinely believe that he’s the antichrist. Or something along those lines. Even if they think he’s just a regular old witch, they stare at his weird tattoos and the fact that he paints his nails and the weird things he says and the weird things he does, and they treat him almost like he’s a hologram instead of a real person. 

It makes Derek angry, when he hears what people say. But as for Stiles, he just smiles and shrugs his shoulders. 

As soon as Stiles is close enough, he stops in his tracks and gives Derek a finger gun. “I thought you’d be wearing your birthday suit.” 

Derek stands from the bench and adjusts his shirt, pulling it this way and that to make sure it looks decent enough for Stiles to have his eyes on. “Shouldn’t that be you?” 

“Why would _I_ be naked on my birthday? Every hot person around me should be naked on my birthday.”

The fact that Stiles has called Derek _hot_ in a roundabout way doesn’t necessarily give him any type of satisfaction; seeing as how Stiles has said as much before not only about Derek but about six-thousand other people just in their general realm of operation, it’s not that great of a compliment. Stiles would likely think a tree in a bikini was hot. 

“Speaking of : happy birthday.”

Stiles’ nose crinkles up as he smiles. “Thanks. Now take me inside and get me some ice cream.” 

Derek does. They walk into the crisply air conditioned little store, and Stiles promptly flocks to the display case with all the flavors listed on the glass, practically pressing his face against it as he stares at the ice cream. He puts the palms of his hands on the wooden edge of the case and peers while Derek comes to stand right beside him. 

He looks over the flavors, even while knowing he always gets cookie dough no matter what happens, and then decides that watching Stiles observe every ice cream available critically like he’s weighing the pros and cons of each is much more interesting. 

Stiles bites his lip and furrows his brow, cocking his head to the side as he goes over the flavors – pecan praline, mint chocolate chip, fudge brownie, cookies and cream…

He leans over the case a bit more, so the tank top he’s wearing shifts just enough that Derek’s attention is caught by a smudge of black right by his underarm. At first, Derek just thinks it’s another one of Stiles’ little tattoos that he’s never had the opportunity to see, so his eyes skirt over it a bit quickly. Then, he double takes it. 

It’s a triskele. A very, very tiny one, yes, but a triskele all the same, identical to the one sitting in between Derek’s shoulder blades. Before he can stop himself, Derek is reaching out and pushing the tank top aside a bit more, exposing Stiles’ pale skin and the black ink. Stiles turns with his eyebrows raised, and Derek strokes across the tattoo with his thumb. 

“When did you get this?” He demands, looking up to meet Stiles’ eyes. 

Stiles looks puzzled, and then he cranes his neck downward to see what Derek is looking at. He smiles when he looks back up, shrugging his shoulders. “Did I never tell you about that?” 

Seeing as how Derek would most certainly remember Stiles telling him that he went ahead and branded himself with the most important symbol of Derek’s life, Derek shakes his head. No, Stiles, you certainly did not fucking mention that. “Why?” 

“Huh?” Stiles crinkles his brow.

“Why would you get that tattoo?” 

Stiles shrugs again, ears going a little pink at the tips, like Derek is about to expose a secret about him or something. “I just figured it’s the unofficial pack mascot, and I’m in the pack, so…” he clears his throat and looks a little uncomfortable. Embarrassed, is the exact word that Derek would use, and Derek knows it’s because of how he’s acting about it. He’s not really responding appropriately, and more to the point, not doing a very good job of showing how he really thinks about it. 

Scrambling to compensate, he runs his thumb across the ink one more time and then pulls away, before it gets too creepy. “I really like it.” 

“Oh, yeah?” Stiles looks relieved, running his hands down the front of his pants as if wiping nervous sweat off of his palms. “Well, good. Because I sorta – you know.” Another shrug, this one more deliberate. “Got it for you.” 

This doesn’t feel like the right setting to be having this conversation. There’s a handful of children milling about, one about a half a foot away from where Stiles is standing with her nose against the glass, salivating over the super chocolate chunk right in front of her face, and not to mention the parents of all those children, and the teenaged scoopers behind the counter. This feels like an insanely personal moment, a private conversation. 

But like with most things that should be done quietly, Stiles does it loudly. Derek stares at him in the wake of what he said, tapping his fingers on the glass. “You got it for me,” he repeats, like the words don’t make sense to him. 

“Yeah,” Stiles nods his head, lasering his eyes down at the moose tracks. “Because, you know, everyone else in the pack is there by blood. It’s, like, a bond. There’s nothing about me that really says I’m in the pack other than everyone saying it all the time, you know? I just thought you wanted solid evidence.” He pats the tattoo with the palm of his hand and smiles. “There’s the solid evidence.” 

Derek never needed any solid evidence that Stiles belonged to him and his pack. There are other wolf packs out there who Derek is sure would kill for the opportunity to have a witch, because if nothing else, a witch is incredibly useful. Case and point, Stiles could have gone anywhere. He could have decided he hated Beacon Hills, packed up his stuff, and gone to Los Angeles or Portland or New York City, found a better pack, trained in magic there. 

But he didn’t. He stayed here, and he’s Derek’s, and that tattoo is nothing but proof of it. Derek stares at his face and can’t help it when his eyes keep flicking to his lips. The desire to kiss him, to finally just do it, is so strong he thinks he could shatter the glass and ruin all of that ice cream in one fell swoop. Stiles’ lips have always looked soft and particularly inviting, like they’ve always been silently asking Derek to kiss them. And now is the time. 

Derek clears his throat and rubs at the back of his neck. “That’s – good,” he says, awkward as all get out. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Stiles smirking, satisfied it would seem. “Moose tracks?” 

Stiles nods, pointing his finger against the glass right in front of the ice cream in question. “Moose tracks.”

***

“Derek. I wish you’d wear the hat.” 

Derek glares up at where Scott is standing over him, hands on his hips, looking like the perfect picture of someone’s disappointed mother. “I’m already crouched on the ground hiding behind a couch underneath a smiling skeleton hanging from the ceiling,” he grouses. “I don’t need to be wearing the hat.” 

For a moment, Scott stands there, wearing his own stupid little black party hat and slapping the rubber band string of the one he wants Derek to be wearing against his palm again and again. He stares, and Derek stares back with his eyebrows up, daring Scott to try and _make him_ wear that hat. A lot of embarrassing things Stiles may have seen from Derek in the past. But this is where Derek draws the line. 

Then, Scott admits defeat and tosses the party hat aside, throwing his hands in the air. “Everyone else is wearing the hats, and you’re gonna look out of place.” 

Everyone else is, indeed, wearing the hats. Even Boyd has one on, which is hands down one of the funniest things Derek has ever seen in his life and he hopes to god there’s pictures of it for him to cackle at for years to come. The fact that all of these people, from the enthusiastic Allison straight down to the annoyed looking Lydia, are willing to put those stupid hats on and leap out from behind various living room furniture is just a testament to how loved and appreciated Stiles really is. 

Derek puts his hand over his eyes. Through grit teeth he says, “give me the hat.” 

Nearly tripping over his own feet in his haste to get at it, Scott hands the hat off to Derek. And Derek puts it on, ruining the gel in his hair most likely, and sits there like an idiot on the Stilinski living room floor while the Monster Mash plays over his head. 

There’s another couple of minutes of everyone milling about in their chosen hiding spots, drinking beers or rum and cokes and munching on potato chips, before the distinct sound of a car pulling up in the drive causes a commotion. Everyone leaps to hide better, shushing each other until the room is deathly quiet. Derek listens as Stiles gets out of the car right behind his father, as the two of them crunch through the gravel and then the grass walking up to the porch. 

Stiles says something about how there better be birthday cake on the other side of the door, opens said door, and flicks on the light. 

The satisfaction of seeing a genuinely shocked and startled expression on Stiles’ face when a chorus of voices attacks him with the word _surprise_ is so great that Derek literally can’t stop smiling. Stiles covers his face with his hands and then ducks into a corner of the room, shoulders shaking with laughter. When everyone surrounds him and he takes his hands away from his face, he goes on and on about how he had no idea, he never saw it coming, and he looks so _happy_. Stiles isn’t an unhappy person on a day to day basis by any means, but he can be a little bit melancholy, and not just with the way he dresses. It’s nice to see him so genuinely gleeful. 

Stiles greets everyone with hugs or handshakes, depending on the person. Example : Isaac gets a handshake, and Erica gets a hug. He makes his way around the room, and Derek stands there drinking his wolfsbane lavender martini Lydia came up with (which looks idiotic in his hand but tastes great and does the trick nonetheless) and braces himself for the disappointment of a handshake. 

His eyes flick across the room to the small present table, where his is boxed up and wrapped in sleek black paper with a black bow on top, and he sips his drink some more. 

Stiles gets to him, and Derek is already reaching out his hand for the shake. Instead of coming into contact with Stiles’ hand, it bounces up against Stiles’ chest as Stiles swoops in like a gull about to take flight. He wraps his arms around Derek’s neck and huffs a laugh there, so it tickles and Derek can _smell him_. “I like you in this hat,” he says, voice low, and the hug is lasting…a long time. 

Far longer than they’ve ever touched before. Derek hugs him back and nearly spills some of his drink down Stiles’ shirt, but catches it at the last second. He smells like magic (all orange rinds and fire and the indescribable smell that reminds him of fireworks) and deodorant and like _Stiles_. 

“I put it on just for you,” Derek says, and Stiles finally pulls back just enough to look him in the face. He keeps his arms locked around Derek’s neck though, loose and light as he smiles. 

“I thought we agreed on you wearing the hat and nothing else.” 

“Did we?” Derek mocks thoughtfulness, tapping his chin. “Huh. Oh, well. Maybe next year.” 

Stiles laughs, the sound high and light in Derek’s ears, and that’s when Derek realizes that he just successfully and actually flirted with him. It went by seamlessly, like it could be that easy all the time, and he made Stiles laugh. After another second, Stiles unfurls his arms from Derek and then leans in, close close close, to give him a brief peck on the cheek. “Thanks for coming,” he says, genuine and almost sweet, and then he’s turning and walking away.

He just leaves Derek standing there, all stunned and starstruck, face bright red. Quickly, he hides in his drink and nearly downs the entire thing so no one will notice. Of course, he flicks his eyes over to where Erica is standing at the punch bowl, a leer so wide on her face you’d think she just won the lottery. 

Derek ignores her in favor of picking at the finger foods on the snack table, shifting his eyes to wherever Stiles is again and again. But there’s only so long that Derek can just stand there feeling the phantom touch of Stiles’ lips on his cheek, or the ghost of Stiles’ arms around him, and he’s here, and Stiles is really happy and Derek is a little bit drunk, so he puts down his plate of snacks. 

He runs the crumbs off his fingers by rubbing them against his jeans and makes his way over to the present table. He grabs his own, smacks it against his palm a few times just to hear the glass vial clinking in the tissue paper against the box, and then breathes out through his nose. Stiles is making himself a drink, dumping ice into a cup and fingering along the bottles of alcohol until finding what he wants. 

Derek squeezes the little package in his hand and makes his way across the room, thinking at the last second to take that ridiculous party hat off and toss it to the side. Stiles is oblivious for a moment, fizzing coke as he pops the can open and then dumps it over the alcohol, but he catches Derek coming and smiles. 

His eyes zero in on the package in Derek’s hand, and he smiles wider. “My replacement gift?” He asks, before sipping at his drink and leaning back against the table. 

“Yeah,” Derek says, and plays with the bow just for something to do with his hands. “I really want you to open it now.” 

“Okay,” Stiles agrees easily, putting his drink aside and making grabby gestures with his hands. “Gimme.” 

Derek hands the box off and doesn’t feel half as nervous as he did about the necklace. That, he genuinely had no idea whether or not Stiles would like. The unicorn blood, Derek is pretty much sure beyond any shadow of a doubt that Stiles is going to lose his shit. The best part is, there can’t be anything truly malicious about unicorn’s blood. If unicorns really are real, that is.

Stiles tears the paper off and tosses it aside, plucking at the lid for the box. He pushes white tissue paper aside, looking stark against his black fingernails, and then he freezes. The lavender substance glitters even more blue in brighter lighting as opposed to in the magic shop, almost ethereal and unreal to see, and Derek watches Stiles’ face go through about ten different emotions as he looks at it. 

Disbelief, shock, mirth, back to disbelief, and then finally landing on a wide eyed, parted lip stare directly at Derek. Gently, Stiles lifts the bottle up with his fingers and then purses his lips, sighing through his nose and giving Derek a look.

It’s not a great look. “Derek,” Stiles starts, and Derek can’t really read his tone. “Oh, you didn’t.” 

Derek blinks at him. “I did.” 

“You didn’t,” Stiles says again, holding the bottle in two fingers like it’s dangerous to hold, or something, and Derek is a bit mystified by this reaction. 

He furrows his brow and steps forward a bit, reaching his hand out as to put it on Stiles’ shoulder. “If this is about the cost –“

“No it’s not,” Stiles’ voice goes low, dangerously low, and then he’s looking around the rest of the party with shifty eyes. Abruptly, he grabs Derek by the shoulder and starts steering him away from everyone else, over to a corner of the room where no one else happens to be standing. “…it’s not about the _price_.” 

“But –“

Stiles holds the bottle up in the air between them, and again, Derek is struck by how…pretty it is. “Where did you get this?” 

Derek stares at him. “Take a _guess_.” 

“Did you steal it?” 

“ _What_?” This is the most shocking thing that Stiles has ever said to him. First of all, as if Derek would ever _need_ to steal something from a store, and second of all, as if he ever genuinely would. 

Again, Stiles is shifting his eyes all around them, grabbing Derek, and guiding him to another corner. This time, they wind up in the hallway just outside the living room, pressed up against the wall. “Who did you get this from?” 

“I – the magic shop?”

Stiles looks at him. His face is indescribable. He looks…worried. Very, very worried. “She sold this to you,” he holds it up again, and Derek nods his head. “She sold this to you.” 

“Yes. Stiles, what’s going on? Do you not like it?” 

Stiles guffaws. Really, really guffaws. He laughs and shakes his head and looks like he’s about to start screaming at any minute. He puts his hands on Derek and starts dragging him off to another section of the house, down the hall, up against the staircase. Derek just goes along with it, like he has no choice, and then Stiles is in his face again. “Of course I like it. I’ve always wanted this stuff,” his voice goes down into a high pitched whisper, like they’re keeping secrets from someone. Or like someone is listening. “But there’s – you don’t just _get_ unicorn blood. Derek there’s a lot of…there’s a lot of. Implication.” 

“Implication.” Derek repeats. The sounds of the party are muted and distant, and Stiles’ face is all ensconced in shadows like something out of a movie, and Derek doesn’t know if this whole thing is scary or ridiculous. 

“Let me ask you something –“ he puts his hands on Derek’s shoulders _again_ , and then they’re up against the wall by the mud room, as far away as they can get from everyone else. “Have you felt like you were being followed since you got this?” 

“If you’re going to tell me a unicorn was following me –“

“ _Have you_?”

Derek can’t believe he’s entertaining this conversation. There are too many thoughts going through his head, chief of which being how _weird_ Stiles’ reaction to this present has been thus far. From Derek’s perspective, he’d thought he’d hit the pot of gold with that stupid bottle of unicorn blood. 

He shakes his head and runs his hand across his forehead. Stiles just looks so serious. He’s not going to walk away without an answer. “I –“ he starts, and then puts his hands on his hips and thinks a little harder. Since he got the blood two days ago, has he noticed _anything_? “…there was a time at the grocery store, but I just thought…” he chews on his bottom lip, feels Stiles’ eyes boring into the side of his face. “…and then once or twice at the loft –“

“Oh, my God,” Stiles mutters, putting his hand over his mouth. “And Crystal sold you this stuff?” 

Derek makes a face. “Her name is _Crystal_?” Of fucking course it is. 

Like Derek didn’t say a single word, Stiles rubs at his forehead and paces back and forth in what little space he’s afforded to do so. He crosses over the wood floor again and again, clutching that bottle of unicorn blood and shaking his head. Derek watches him for a moment, a frown on his face, and then he sighs through his nose.

“Did I do something wrong?” He asks, and Stiles stops. 

Immediately he’s in Derek’s face, putting one hand on Derek’s chest to push him back to another spot (and why he keeps doing that is absolutely beyond Derek.) The other comes up to press against Derek’s cheek, Stiles’ palm warm and his fingers thin and long. He says, “no, no, you didn’t do anything wrong. If anyone did, Crystal –“

Derek can’t help snorting. 

“…but listen. Listen to me,” he pats Derek’s cheek, as if getting his attention again. “Unicorn blood is – people aren’t supposed to have it. It’s sort of like if I went into a church and took the communion after it’s been blessed and used it to do magic,” he looks away, towards the window. “It’s…sacred.” 

“I’m still not convinced that’s not just glue and glitter water,” Derek says, for lack of anything better to say. It’s always weird to see Stiles be so intense about something – or, maybe that’s the wrong word. It’s weird to see Stiles not making a joke out of something to lighten the tension, but he’s sure as shit not joking now. 

“This isn’t funny,” Stiles says, and then he peeks out the window again. He looks a little anxious. Derek follows his eye line, frowns, and turns back to face him. 

“What exactly do you think is going to happen?” He asks, voice low and careful. “Who would you think is following me?” 

Stiles runs his hand over his mouth. “It’s just like I said, there are some people who take it very, very seriously. And you having it was one thing – you’re just a werewolf. But giving it to _me_ …” he trails off, and there are five seconds of silence between them.

They’re standing up against the wall, each of them with one shoulder pressed to the paint, staring at one another. Neither of them react much when, with a loud _thwap_ , an arrow head shoots directly in between them through the wall from the outside. 

Stiles go cross eyed looking at it, and Derek parts his lips. A beat passes. Then, Derek says, “you’re kidding me,” in a low voice, and Stiles’ eyes go big. “You are _fucking_ kidding me.” 

Derek takes Stiles by the wrist and tugs him away from the wall, right on time. As soon as Stiles staggers back against the opposite wall, where the stairs sit, another arrow shoots through the outside of the house. It lodges itself right where Stiles’ head had been not two seconds earlier, and Stiles glares at it and gives Derek a look. Derek doesn’t return it. 

He keeps his hold on Stiles’ wrist and pulls him down the hallway, into the kitchen, where Scott is standing with a frown on his face. Scott says, “what’s going on?” There’s a _thwap, thwap, thwap_ , undoubtedly more arrows hitting the side of the house, and Scott perks up like a dog listening for a threat. “What is that?” 

Derek keeps his hold on Stiles but keeps Stiles’ body behind his as best as he can, and walks up to the window. He keeps low, so only his eyes stick out, and he scans the back yard and the tree line with narrowed eyes. 

He pulls back away from the window quickly, and looks Stiles dead in the eyes. Stiles chews on his thumb, shrugging his shoulders. 

“Who is it?” Scott demands, and Stiles and Derek just keep staring at each other. 

“The Knights of the Round Table,” Stiles offers, and from what Derek just saw, he’s not that far off. 

It’s a long line of dudes on horses with bow and arrows. There’s no shining silver armor and there’s no swords, necessarily – but holy shit, if Derek had to _imagine_ a group of people intent on protecting, of all things, unicorns, this is exactly what he’d imagine. A bunch of assholes on horses acting like they’re living in the year 1699. 

“Come out, witch!” One of them calls, and Derek peers out the window to see who has to be the ringleader galloping back and forth across the treeline, holding an honest to god lit torch in his hand. “Answer for your maliciousness!” 

“Maliciousness,” Stiles repeats, eyes big with surprise as a slow smile spreads across his face. “Well, all right.” 

Erica comes clacking into the kitchen with a drink in her hand, looking a bit put out. “Did everyone forget there’s a party going on in there?” She demands, lifting a single eyebrow. It’s not two seconds later that a flaming arrow comes shooting through the window, shattering it into dozens of pieces and sending that drink out of Erica’s hand and onto the floor. 

Derek shields Stiles’ body with his own and ducks him down, but Stiles doesn’t stay down for long. He hands the unicorn blood off to Derek, stands up to his full height, and frowns while Allison frantically stomps out the fire growing on his living room carpet. The Sheriff stands there with his hands on his hips, right next to the door that he _just_ had replaced from when the mummy born from Derek’s last gift to Stiles tore through it in a fit of undead rage. He throws his hands in the air and hisses, “why is this always happening at _my_ god damn house?” 

Stiles glares out the window, while Derek tries to grab his shoulder to tell him to get down. They shoot another arrow that just misses Stiles’ ear by inches, but Stiles doesn’t pay it any mind. He rattles off a curse Derek has never heard him use before and snaps his fingers, his eyes going that eerie shade of black around the edges as the magic passes through him. 

Derek watches as one of the men reaches for another arrow from his pack. He comes up with a snake instead. All of the arrows they had brought with them have been turned into snakes, slithering out of the arrow sheaths and flopping off of the horse’s backs in packs of dozens, swarming around the horses’ feet and spooking them to all oblivion. 

“That solves that,” Stiles says, and looks vaguely smug about it. The horses whinny, and a few of them abandon their riders to go galloping off as far away from the pit of snakes as they can possibly get. There’s some cursing and a lot of cofluffle from the yard, and it seems Stiles has indeed successfully distracted them and, for the moment, immobilized them. 

A snake comes squiggling into the kitchen from underneath the back door, and Erica takes about three huge steps back with a high pitched noise from the back of her throat, while Allison just looks on with a hint of distaste. “Now you have a snake problem,” Allison says, displeased. 

Without missing a beat, Stiles leans down and scoops the snake up in his hand, so it curls around his fingers and flicks its tongue at him a few times. He says, “garden snakes,” with a shrug, and then smiles nice and wide. It’s a little menacing, his eyes black and a snake wrapped around his wrist, to see him smiling like that. “Harmless critters.” 

He dumps the snake into the pocket of his over shirt and starts off toward the back door before anyone can say anything to stop him. He tugs on the door handle, throws it open to reveal a pile of snakes hissing and curling all around each other in a mess that even has Derek stopping to pause with a chill up his spine, and then he just walks out. 

The snakes, bizarrely and otherworldly, part for him as he walks. It’s like watching Moses part the red fucking sea – they shift and separate a clear path for him to walk, and Derek stands and stares after him in shock for only as long as he can.

Then, he scrambles to follow, being sure to keep his feet only in the clear wake that Stiles leaves behind. “Stiles,” he calls, while Stiles is descending the porch and a small band of men try to corral their last two horses away from the snakes. “ _Stiles_.” 

“I got this,” he says over his shoulder, but Derek still follows, picking up his pace. The snakes it would seem are generally harmless, but unsavory all the same – they try to curl around Derek’s ankles as he walks and he recoils, shaking them off with a huff. 

Stiles stops about ten feet away from the men, holding his hands up as if in surrender as the snakes part for him in a big circle. “Fellas,” he starts, and Derek palms his forehead and skids to a stop right behind him. “…I think we’ve had a misunderstanding.” 

One of them waves a torch around in the air, while his horse goes bonkers and nearly kicks his head off. “Your very existence is a disgrace to nature,” he shouts, and Derek feels like he’s in an episode of the Game of Thrones or some shit. “You dare to take pure blood and –“ 

“Nobody took any pure blood,” he says in a placating tone, still holding his hands up, and Derek shakes his head frantically in agreement behind him. “Let’s all just calm down. The snakes are harmless. I have no interest in disgracing nature. My friend here,” he points behind him to Derek, “made a mistake. I don’t take pure blood and make black magic out of it, let’s all just sit down and have a calm conversation about this.” 

Derek is just about to take Stiles by his shoulder and suggest they put more distance between themselves and the weirdos, but he never gets the chance. Even with Stiles’ calm demeanor and his hands in the air, even with the assurance that the snakes are not black mambas or something or equal terror, of course it wasn’t going to end that easily. 

Another small band of men, not on horseback this time, has emerged from the bushes and the trees, and one of them blows pure wolfsbane directly into Derek’s face. He recoils with a shout, blinded with his eyes stinging and his senses momentarily cut off. 

In the background, he hears a bit of a scuffle. Stiles grunts and tries to say something, another curse most likely, but one of the men hollers _cover his mouth_ at the top of his lungs, and they must manage it pretty successfully, because Stiles goes silent. There’s some more shuffling, Derek rubs at his eyes and blinks them frantically, and then finally, he can see. 

They’ve got Stiles with a brown sack over his head, hanging off the side of one of their horses, and off they go. Derek stands there for a second, dumbfounded, watching Stiles flail his limbs to try and get free, but it’s no use. The whole lot of them vanishes into the tree line, leaving Derek alone with the snakes and the pitter patter of the pack’s footsteps running out behind them, and Derek rubs at his eyes some more.

“God dammit,” he hisses, watching Stiles vanish into the trees. He starts running, mostly on instinct, and half wolfs-out, claws sprouting and his eyes glowing red. “God _fucking_ dammit, Stiles.” 

He runs. He knows he’s faster than a horse when he really does his best, and he knows that just catching up to them won’t be enough. He hears Erica and Boyd and Scott are with him, and Allison calls out that she’ll go get her weapons from inside, but Derek just runs, and he’s cursing Stiles in his head the entire time. He never should’ve gone out there and tried to talk to them.

Diplomacy? With weirdos obsessed with unicorns? Never fucking works. 

“We have to cut them off,” Derek says to Scott, who nods his understanding and huffs a bit of a laugh.

“It wouldn’t really be a party if something like this didn’t happen,” he pants, smiling a bit crookedly. When it comes to Stiles being in trouble, the pack has more or less gotten used to it. It’s not that he can’t handle his own – because he really, really can – it’s just that he has a bizarre knack for running his mouth and getting himself into these situations. And if he can’t speak and use his spells, then he’s useless. 

They run in a wide circle around the perimeter and Derek can hear when they’ve managed to overtake them. From this close, Derek can hear Stiles trying to muffle out spells through whatever they’ve used to gag him, to absolutely no avail. The most he can likely do in his situation is give a little shock to the horse with his finger tips – which he would never do on principle alone, and would also most likely just spook the horse into running faster. 

Derek barks an order to come around, and his pack follows, and they burst through the trees into a clearing just in time to stop the men and their horses in their tracks. It’s almost funny to see Stiles dangling off the side of a horse, his converse clad feet kicking for dear life, but Derek doesn’t have any time to focus on the details.

The horses buck up and whinny, agitated by the blockade, and Derek pulls the bottle of unicorn blood out from his back pocket and holds it up in the air along with his other hand. A surrender. “Here,” he says, frantic. “Here’s the unicorn blood, it was my fault. He didn’t know I had it, and I didn’t know that it was – I didn’t think unicorns were real.” 

The men stare at him. This is the weirdest interaction he’s ever had with any of their many villains from the past. 

“I know now that they totally are,” he goes on, while Erica coughs a laugh into her hand because she can hear the lie in his heartbeat. “And that this isn’t a toy. It’s very – uh – sacred.” 

“Sacred,” one of the knights repeats, with all the severity in the world, and Erica is choking to keep herself from bursting out laughing behind him. “The most sacred of all the creatures on this earth, and you took it to desecrate it with your heathenistic devil magic –“

“Okay, okay, okay,” Derek holds his hands up higher, waving the bottle around a bit. “There will be no desecration. I’ll give you this bottle back, and you give me back my witch, and we can all just forget about this.” 

There’s a pause. Stiles kicks his legs some more to try and get purchase on land, but his feet can’t reach, while above him the men murmur to one another. Ten very long seconds pass, and then the ringleader squares his shoulders on top of his horse, the same one that Stiles is dangling off of as they speak, and holds his hand out. “Bring me the blood,” he says, “and you can have your satanic spawn back.” 

Derek swallows a lump in his throat, and cautiously approaches them. His feet break branches and crush dead leaves underfoot as he goes, and the men watch him with wary eyes the closer he gets. He doesn’t know what these guys think of werewolves - they might not think that werewolves are necessarily the devil’s children like they seem to think that witches are, but he’s fairly certain they don’t care for him or his pack. Derek doesn’t know exactly which bizarre religious sect they came out of, but he hopes they base themselves far, far away from Beacon Hills. 

He hands the unicorn’s blood off to the knight, who rips it out of his hand and tucks it away in one of the pouches on his horse’s saddle. Without another word, he pops a knife out of its sheath and cuts the rope holding Stiles onto the horse off. Down Stiles goes with an unceremonious _plop_ into the underbrush, wiggling himself free of his restraints. 

Derek grabs him, rips the bag off of his head and pulls at the gag they put on him. Stiles sucks in a great big breath through his mouth as Derek leads him away from the men, glaring over his shoulder and wrapping his arm around Stiles protectively. 

“You would do well to cut that thing’s tongue out,” the knight calls, and Stiles rolls his eyes and coughs. 

He says a quick curse under his breath, snaps his fingers with an eerie green electric glow, and behind them, Derek hears the sound of all the men’s bodies hitting the ground in just the same way that Stiles just had.

Derek looks over his shoulder to see that Stiles has gone and transformed all their horses into…miniature horses. Like, _tiny_. They have stubby legs and little bodies that aren’t big enough to hold even the saddles they were wearing before, let alone fully grown men. Derek snorts, turning back around to face forward and guide Stiles and the rest of his pack out of the forest and back to the house. 

“Mark my words,” comes from behind them, and Stiles just keeps on walking, “if I ever cross you again, witch, I’ll have you on the stake.”

“Blah blah blah,” Stiles says, miming a talking mouth with his hand. “Bunch of larping freaks.” 

Derek is quiet for some time, while the pack talks over his head and laughs about unicorns and how idiotic the entire thing was. Derek knows that it was pretty funny, especially the miniature horses, but, again, he has to remind himself that the entire reason that any of this happened was because of him. He’s the dumbass who bought unicorn blood to begin with, no thanks to fucking Crystal at the magic shop, just like he was the dumbass who bought the stupid mummy stone. 

He sighs, tightens his arm around Stiles’ shoulder. “Hey,” he starts, voice low. “I apologize for all this. I really didn’t know unicorn blood was anything that serious, and I still think that stuff was glitter glue, but I – I just really wanted to get you something you really wanted. First the mummy, and now this.” He scuffs his feet in the twigs and leaves underfoot as they walk. “I really ruined your birthday.”

“Derek,” Stiles says, voice loud enough that it almost echoes against the tree tops. He stops and pulls himself out of Derek’s arm, spinning around so that they’re facing one another, and narrows his eyes. The pack goes on without them, Erica looking over her shoulder with a gleeful expression, and then they’re alone in the woods right on the outskirts of Stiles’ property. “Can I ask you something?” 

“Anything, yeah,” Derek says, confused. 

“What was with all this?” He holds his arms out and gestures at nothing, as if the woods themselves encompass everything that’s happened in the past week. “It’s okay that you’re not the best gift giver, you know? Not everyone is good at it. I would’ve been cool with a gift card and the ice cream, but you were really persistent.” 

“Well,” and his voice is low, unsure. He clears his throat, and looks away. 

“I don’t know if there’s some weird guilt thing you have or if you’re just trying to make up for past presents, but I’m not very materialistic,” he points to himself, and that’s when Stiles sees that the little snake from earlier is still in Stiles’ shirt pocket, sticking its head out like it’s listening to this conversation. “I might be satan’s spawn according to some circles, but I don’t need nice gifts. You know that about me. So what’s the deal?” He reaches out and gives Derek’s shoulder a playful shove, grin spreading across his face. “You’ve been weird for weeks, now.” 

“I haven’t been _weird_ ,” Derek defends a little childishly. 

“You’ve been weird.” 

“I just – it was your birthday, and you’re – a pack member,” he bullshits, and crosses his arms over his chest. 

“I don’t remember you going out of your way to buy evil mummy necklaces and unicorn blood for Erica’s birthday.” 

“Stiles,” Derek warns, looking away toward where he can see the lights on in Stiles’ house through the trees. 

“I just wanna know!” Stiles says, smile on his face as his holds his arms out. “Since all this happened to me, I feel I deserve an explanation. It was very un-you to buy me gifts like that, you know? This isn’t even an important birthday, and out of nowhere, you’re out here buying me this, and buying me that, and I just –“

Maybe just to shut him the hell up, or maybe just because he’s finally reached his breaking point and can’t hold it back any longer, Derek grabs Stiles by his shoulders and kisses him. It’s a hard kiss, so abrupt and quick that Stiles is stiff and still underneath him, no time to react or reciprocate. 

Derek pulls back, but keeps his face close, so Stiles’ eyelashes brush against his cheek when he blinks. His eyes are big in his head, his lips parted in surprise, and Derek stands there with his hands on him and swallows and feels exposed. Totally bared in front of Stiles, who sees everything and knows everything, but never saw this coming. “So,” Derek begins with a lump in his throat, “I might be out of my mind in love with you. Or whatever. And that’s why I bought you an evil mummy rock and a pint of sacred glitter glue.” 

Stiles says nothing. There’s this extended moment of silence where all of Derek’s worst fears come true – where Stiles hates him now or doesn’t want to talk to him or feels weird around him or wants to leave the pack and get that tattoo removed because Derek went and fucked all of it up. And Derek couldn’t live with that, so he keeps his hands on Stiles for as long as Stiles will allow him to, and stands there, and he waits. A slap in the face. A laugh in his face. Anything.

Instead, Stiles leans up and kisses Derek himself, and the feeling is so much different. It’s how Derek always used to imagine what kissing Stiles would be like. His lips are soft and smooth, and he tastes like fireworks and citrus, and he presses his body nice and tight up against Derek’s so Derek can feel every inch of him, right there.

Stiles wraps his arms around Derek’s neck and separates from the kiss, taking a brief moment to nuzzle his nose against Derek’s and laugh a little breathlessly. “Now, wasn’t that easier than buying me evil failure gifts?” 

“You’re not freaked out?” Derek asks, still skeptical even as Stiles has got his body flush up against him. “I mean you…” 

Stiles scrunches his nose up and shakes his head. “You’ve always been so slow on the uptake.” 

“You like me,” Derek blinks at him, and Stiles nods. 

“I like you a lot,” he shrugs like this is nothing to him, admitting it is easy – and hell, maybe now, it is. “I might be a little in love with you, too.” 

Derek does the only thing he can think to do – he kisses Stiles again. And then again, and again, obsessed with how it feels to just be able to _do that_. After all this time spent waiting, fantasizing, pining after who he thought was an impossible catch, and now he’s got it. 

After another minute or two, Derek feels distinctly a snake slither over his foot, and he jerks back with a shout, startled. Stiles watches this with a laugh, entire face lighting up with it, and Derek glowers. “Stiles, come on,” he gestures to the whole lot of them, sending themselves away from Stiles’ house and into the forest. “Can’t you zap them back?” 

Stiles sighs, rolling his eyes. “I don’t see what the fun in that is,” he snaps his fingers, and the slithering and hissing and creepiness stops. They turn back into arrows, immobile and still on the ground. He picks the arrow out of his pocket and twirls it a bit, “but there it is.” 

“You’re the strangest person,” Derek tells him, pulling him by his hand so they can get close again. Stiles smiles at him, running his hands up and down Derek’s chest. “I want to take you on a date.” 

“I wanna go to the lizard exhibit,” he says lightning quick, and Derek should’ve known. He breathes through his nose, since there’s really nothing he likes less than zoos, but he knows he’ll be there anyway. 

All that really matters is he’ll be there with Stiles.


End file.
